art, thoughts and philosophy

SNESoIP: The SNES ethernet adapter

Remember, back in the olden days, when you spent hours with your friends playing your favorite games on the SNES? Good times, good times.
But you all grew up and moved away, spread out over the world. What would you give if you could once again meet up and play those beloved games together?

Fret not, here’s just the thing you need.

The SNESoIP ethernet adapter for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (also known as the Super NES, SNES or Super Nintendo) is an open-source, proof-of-concept, network-bridge for sharing local controller-inputs over the Internet.
The project it currently in its early stage, but fully functional and could be used to play multiplayer games over the Internet.

The SNESoIP will push your controller input to a remote server and receive your playing partner’s controller input from the server and forward everything together to your local SNES (same thing for the other player). It works quite well as long as you have low latency and not too many random events which of course cannot be synced.

SNESoIP is an open-source project developed completely in my spare time. If you find it useful, please consider donating a small amount of money. Your donation will be used to support further development of the project.

7 responses to “SNESoIP: The SNES ethernet adapter”

Wouldn’t it be easier (for the sake of removing the issues with random encounters) to divide the system into a master/slave design? The master unit connects to the actual SNES, and then the slave unit simply outputs the video signal to the other player(s)’ TV and relays the control input back to the master unit.

Hi mathieu,
the whole project is in a very early stage and it’s probably not very useful to you if you just wanna use it (instead of developing it further). The current firmware hasn’t even a configuration interface and it depends on my (hard-coded) server address etc.

Besides that, I have no time to build these devices. That’s probably one of the reasons why I decided to release it under the terms of an open source license. Sorry!